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Maryland Beaten Biscuits
4 cupfuls flour ½ cupful Crisco Water 1 teaspoonful salt Milk Mix and sift flour and salt. Cut Crisco in with knife or work in lightly with finger tips. Mix a little milk and water together chill thoroughly and add enough to dry ingredients to make stiff dough. Everything should be as cold as possible. Beat with rolling-pin until dough blisters. Roll to one-third inch in thickness and cut into small biscuits, prick in center and set in refrigerator an hour before baking. Place biscuits on Criscoed tins and bake in moderate oven thirty minutes. Biscuits may be baked in moderate gas oven and gas turned off when biscuits are golden brown. Allow biscuits to remain ten minutes in cooling oven to dry out.
Sufficient for sixty small biscuits, a fraction larger than a dollar. 1 cupful scalded milk 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful boiling water 1/4 cupful sugar
A leavenless biscuit that rises only on the steam and air beaten into it, so the beating is not optional and cannot be shortened. Everything else in the method exists to keep the dough cold enough to take that beating without turning greasy.
- The hinge: beat until it blistersFold the dough over on itself and strike it with a rolling pin or the flat of a heavy mallet for 20 to 30 minutes, until the surface raises small taut blisters and the dough turns satiny. That mechanical work is the only leavening; a food processor run for 2 to 3 minutes is the usual modern substitute, though the crumb is slightly less flaky.
- Crisco and its substitutesCrisco was a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening; modern Crisco has since been reformulated to cut trans fats, so the two are not identical. Half a cup of modern vegetable shortening works; chilled lard, the older Maryland fat, is often preferred for flavour and a crisper shell.
- Moderate oven350F. The gas-oven variation amounts to baking at 350F until golden, then switching the oven off and leaving the biscuits in the falling heat 10 minutes to dry the centres, which is what keeps them hard rather than bready.
- Water and milkNo proportion is given: roughly half and half, iced, added a little at a time. The dough should be genuinely stiff, closer to pasta dough than to drop-biscuit batter.
- Why they must be coldFat that softens smears into the flour and the biscuits come out short and crumbly instead of layered. Chill the bowl and the liquid, and if the dough warms during beating, refrigerate it 15 minutes and carry on.
- Pricking and restingThe centre prick lets steam escape so the biscuits stay flat rather than puffing and splitting. The hour in the refrigerator firms the fat again after all that handling; do not skip it.
- Size and yieldA silver dollar is about 1 1/2 inches across, so cut rounds a shade larger than that at a third of an inch thick. Sixty is realistic, and being hard and dry they keep well in a tin.
- What done looks likePale gold, hard on the outside, dry and slightly flaky within, with a distinct snap when broken. They are classically split and filled with country ham rather than treated like a soft breakfast biscuit.
Beaten biscuits belong to the Chesapeake and the upper South, where soft winter wheat and no reliable chemical leavening produced a cracker-like bread raised entirely by pounding. Before the late nineteenth century the beating was done with an axe head, a flatiron or a special ridged mallet against a hardwood block or a tree stump, and it was slave labour and then domestic-servant labour that made the dish practical in the households that served it; the arrival of the hand-cranked biscuit brake, a later nineteenth-century development, is often said to have kept it alive. Its appearance in a Crisco promotional cookbook can be read as a deliberate piece of positioning: the shortening's makers appear to have been arguing that a factory fat could stand in for lard in the most tradition-bound recipes in the American repertoire, and a Maryland beaten biscuit was about as tradition-bound as they came.